Pantsuits, Jim Crow, and the Head that Wears the Crown

My father once admonished, “Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor the last to put the old aside.”  At thirteen, in 1973, I saw no wisdom in his explanation of why I could not wear pants instead of a dress to church, at a time when most things, including fashion, were rapidly changing for women. Dad was not generally one to defend tradition for tradition’s sake, but he was an elder in our conservative church.  For him, there were other considerations -- larger, institutional implications that took precedence over my desire to wear a “pantsuit” for worship.  Then came the day of the rare Alabama snowstorm.  Of course, young ladies couldn’t be expected to wear dresses to brave the elements, at some peril, to attend worship – and the taboo fell on that sparsely-attended Sunday morning.  And so change sometimes happens quickly, despite opposition. But sometimes not.

My father was the superintendent of education who implemented a desegregation plan in the Florence, Alabama, city schools. I recall seemingly endless weeks of tense phone calls and late-night meetings, after which he would come home and stay up long into the night, drinking coffee, taking more calls, smoking, and considering his response to the latest incident. He met with groups of African American parents, spoke at African American churches, pacified groups of white parents, advocated for the plan to the press and to neighborhood groups.  And there were threats.  At the instruction of the police, Dad wore a shoulder holster with a 38-caliber revolver under his suit, especially when he was in his office or a school building at night. A plastic bag in my dresser drawer contains a bullet that was fired at our house one night by some faceless racist who couldn't stand the change that was coming.

This week’s Arkansas Times cover photo is of Dr. George Benson, one of the early administrators of my alma mater, then called Harding College, with the headline “HARDING and the AMERICAN WAY – How a College President Stifled Desegregation.”  The headline, overprinted on a black-and-white image of Dr. Benson, jumped at me from a newspaper box at a Conway diner where I eat breakfast occasionally.  The article recounted a 1958 petition by students and faculty in support of integration.  The writer detailed Dr. Benson’s initial opposition to integration, using Benson's own notes to reconstruct his remarks to the student body. I was fascinated to read the signatures on the photograph of the petition; I was pleased and proud to recognize many names on it. Dr. Benson finally announced that Harding would integrate in 1963.

When my sister, a Harding student, married in 1976, two African American friends were attendants in her wedding, so it never occurred to me when I arrived in 1978 that it had not been long since the campus was integrated. There were any number of African American students, and interracial dating on campus. A few years ago, however, when my eleventh grade history students investigated positions on integration among various church denominations, we learned that the subject of race had been complex, contentious and divisive for many churches and related organizations and colleges.

Now – indulge me - back to the pants issue.  Let me be clear, the question of whether to accept women wearing pants to church was in no way substantively equivalent to the question of whether to include as equals in the pew, or the classroom, those whom God includes as equal in the kingdom. But contrast the kingdom with the visible church: administered as it is by fallen humans with preferences and prejudices and petty insecurities that inevitably we bring into the earthly institutions that align their mission with God’s.  Heaven help us.  My father’s response to the trouser question did have this in common with Dr. Benson's: he felt that while he was a watchman on the wall, change would not be sudden, lest it be seen as capricious. Small comfort that was to a black student whose identity was trivialized and marginalized by Jim Crow, but I believe Dad’s reasoning is relevant to this conversation.

I don't defend the indefensible when it comes to any stance against integration.  My students know that I see those who make racist comments, or who romanticize the Old South with its forced labor economy, as the kindred of those who would have tried to hurt my father back when he was integrating that school district so long ago. But part of the job of a history teacher is to caution students against judging figures from the past by the standards of the present.  We may read the documentary evidence, learn about their lives, and discuss them in the context of a greater stream of culture.  We must certainly at some level make moral judgments about their actions – but they were of their time and we are of ours. Each generation has enough for which to be accountable without inserting contemporary sensibilities into the mind of someone from the past.  It’s presumptuous.

“Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor the last to put the old aside,” may seem a recipe for mediocrity -- one that doesn’t appropriately value innovation and clings to tired ideas, or even wrongheaded ones.  It's an expression more rooted in practicality than moral ideals. We prefer to believe our leaders would, on moral issues, act without fear of consequence or reprisal, but the Arkansas Times article illustrated what has always been true: the very young can well afford to be the reckless idealists among us precisely because they are not yet responsible for our institutions. The world needs the passionate vision of young people because they still see the world with a clarity unobstructed by the pragmatic considerations that might lead an older, more powerful man to compromise something important. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," or words to that effect.

One last personal story: when that same man who held me back from the precipice of "slacks" at worship was young himself and had just arrived back from the war, he became the principal at the tiny school at Williford, Arkansas.  In 1951, he scheduled an exhibition basketball game between his all-white team and an all-black team.  When word got out, he was summoned to Little Rock by the director of the somewhat formidable arbiter of student extracurriculars, the Arkansas Activities Association -- where Dad was informed that he could only play teams “who were members of the all-white AAA or an equivalent association,” and the AAA definitely did not consider the black association equivalent. Dad said he thanked the man and went back to Williford and played the team anyway.  He was young then, and didn't know all the institutional considerations that were at stake, perhaps.

Dr. Benson acted much as many other men of his time who were charged with the protection and growth of institutions both large and small, from churches to country clubs to the armed forces -- he hesitated and resisted doing what was right on this issue out of fear of unpredictable consequences to the organization. Any number of progressive reformers of our nation's government, such as FDR,  likewise did not run quickly to full integration without reservation. They considered both advantageous timing and political fallout.  History is rife with examples of overt racism on the part of twentieth century American leaders, both secular and religious, who otherwise were admirable.  It’s a fact we should neither sweep under the rug nor rationalize. It’s a great tragedy of human history that segregation was played out in our nation long after the Civil War, with the blessing of our churches, and that Jim Crow was given aid and comfort by the highest court in the land. The story of the United States has always been a tale of a circuitous journey toward the ideals of the Declaration: a collective journey toward sanctification, if you will, by a host of the fallen.